The Ecological Paradigm Shift of Pope Francis

 The Ecological Paradigm Shift of Pope Francis

Pope Francis defines discernment thus:

Discernment is necessary not only at extraordinary times when we need to resolve grave problems and make crucial decisions. It's a means of spiritual combat for helping us to follow the Lord more faithfully. We need at all times, to help us recognize God's timetable, lest we fail to heed the promptings of his grace and disregard his invitation to grow. Often discernment is exercised in small and apparently irrelevant things since greatness of spirit is manifested in simple every day realities…I ask all Christians not to omit, in dialogue with the Lord, a sincere daily "examination of conscience." Discernment also enables us to recognize the concrete means that the Lord provides in his mysterious and loving plan, to make us move beyond mere good intentions.^[1]

The issues at stake are about the ecological and environmental crisis. These issues are to be engaged with an outlook that is global but also within properly contextualized outlooks: family life, poverty index, terrorism threats, social structured injustices, and international peaceful relationships, control of pollution, global warming phenomenon, and human trafficking networks. According to Pope Francis, this has to set in time for many things to change the course, direction, and trajectory, above all the human beings who are in charge of rightful reading the signs of the times:

Many things have to change course, but it's we human beings above all who need to change. If we lack an awareness of our common origin, of our mutual belonging, and our future to be shared with everyone. This basic awareness would enable the development of new convictions, attitudes, and forms of life. A great cultural spiritual and educational challenge stands before us, and it will demand that we set out the long path of renewal.^[2]

In this research, we are venturing into scientific paradigms which are a collection of texts, theories that have to be tested, tools that help in problem-solving in given specific communities in understanding the world around them, how all have to be engaged in defining the challenges and approaches utilized to reach holistic paradigm shift. This is also built up by S. Covey:

The word paradigm stems from the Greek word paradeigma, originally a scientific term, but commonly used today to mean a perception, assumption theory, frame of reference or lens through which you view the world. It’s like a map of a territory or city. Inaccurate, it will make no difference how hard you try to find your destination or how positively you think, you will stay lost. If accurate, then diligence and attitude matter. But not until.^[3]

While on the other hand, J. Gardener states:

Most ailing organizations have developed a functional blindness to their own defects. They are not suffering because they cannot resolve their problems, but because they cannot see their problems. The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. If we want to make minor incremental changes and improvements, work on practices, behavior or attitudes. But if you want to make a significant quantum improvement, work on paradigms.^[4]

Man has to get in touch with the environmental ecology once more and start singing the love tones of nature as St. Francis could sing the Laudato Si’, for as tree branches swing themselves in praise of the creator and praising themselves, birds of the air producing lovely song tunes, sounds of the rivers and lakes whizzing, hissing of insects, reptiles, should remind man of his responsibility of being a co-creator called to take care of the garden of common home, cultivating and nurturing it.

Man is called upon to grasp the pace and logic of creation. A man takes care of his personal body, he should also realize that the same attitude and passion ought to be rendered to the environmental ecology. Man is considered a gentleman on the way he takes care of everything that is around him. This is what Pope Benedict XVI calls the origin and rhythm of a love story between God and man.^[5]

1.3 Ecology and its Historical Developments

As one gets himself into research on ecology as a science, we come across many types of ecology that are packaged as political ideologies and controversies. In this research, we shall not trend on those controversies or ideologies but will help us to see where we are coming from.

It’s from Germany that we come to unveil the term Oekologie that first appeared in 1860. The term was used by a German biologist, E. Haeckel in 1866 to indicate the study of organism's relation to the exterior surrounding world, that is, in a broad sense, the study of the conditions of existence. He developed what has later termed Haeckel's law of recapitulation according to the principle that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny', and was first to draw up a genealogical tree relating the various orders of animals. As a philosopher, he was exponent to monistic philosophy, which postulated a totally materialistic view of life a unity and which he presented as a necessary consequence of the theory of evolution.^[6]

The term ecologism is usually connected to ideologies which conflict with the Catholic faith. It is, therefore, necessary to take caution to differentiate between ecology as science versus ecologism as mere ideology. Today, we live in the world where there is a propaganda promotion of almost everything in the name of spirituality, in all sorts of branding and promotions, integrating elements of pagan religions and traditions of global indigenous cultures with an emerging scientific understanding of the universe.

The Church has on several occasions has drawn attention to these problems and advised vigilance on the part of the faithful.^[7] As politics and economies take the center stage, some political ideologies are advanced at the exclusion of some people and those who advance those ideologies are usually funded by big international firms to cause a mess in the ecological systems and structures. Those who are usually in the receiving end in all these dramas are the poor.  This is clearly stated by Boff who puts the poor and the earth on the same level of those being equally oppressed:

The existence of rich and poor in our societies is in itself a form of ecological aggression. The rich consume too much, wastefully and without thought for the present or future generations; they have set up a technology of death to defend their privileged position, with nuclear chemical arsenals that could, at worst, bring about biocide, ecocide and even genocide; furthermore, they defend a production system whose inner logic makes it predator of nature. The poor, the victims of the rich, consume less and, in order to survive, live in unhealthy conditions, cut down forests, contaminate waters and soil, kill rare animals and so on. With greater social justice they would be able to operate better environmental justice.^[8]

As we come to the understanding of ecology and ecologism and its historical development. One has to put in mind that ecology comes attached to political ideologies. We have so many ecologies but all tied with political ideologies and political correctness. Within the ecology, we find a system to be manipulated and worse once it lands in the hands of politicians, they use it for their political milestone. It often starts as something small and for the common good of all, but in the long run, ends up as a tool for destruction.

As we learn more about the environmental and ecological crisis within this common home, we cannot simply ignore the politics that is also being advanced in this common home. The ecological and environmental crisis has political underlying tones and once it gets mixed with politics without principles or education without morals it ends up being a timing bomb in the making, ready to be activated at the appointed time. All this will depend on our understanding of the environment this common home is based and who are the key plays in the fight against environmental degradation, what are their invested interest.

1.4 The Environment

The term ‘environment’ leads us into the discussion of ecology and its various themes. One can speak of the natural environment, which includes the physical environment with its mineral resources, energy, water, air and so forth.[9] These resources have to be clearly protected that the communities can learn to protect and share resources rather than government putting them into corporate hands.

Today environmental destruction has taken different manifestations and revelation. We are fighting environmental destruction but we buy and drink plastic bottled water, we are all up in arms with international firms but we are the same people cutting down trees for building our homes and producing tones and tones of ecclesial documents from paper, which come from cut tress. There is lack of transparency and accountability impacting on the human rights and ecological abuses involved in their sourcing and production. We talk one thing but our actions communicate something different. We have become unconcerned that we have become at the same time complicit consumers of this business process. We have all have become compromised into the conspiracy of silence.

Auer, states: “The environment is constituted by the whole of our living conditions; therefore, not only “raw nature”, but also the “living space created by man”.[10]This means that we have to go beyond the ordinary understanding of term environment. There’s more to this than meet the eye. We have to build the culture of getting back to the basics of knowing where we are as in terms of the environment, what are doing that is helping us build a just society but above all being just to nature a gift bestowed upon man by God. If we are not conscious of where we are, not full of self-love, not learnt to cry over our sins then we have not yet started living, for living means being able to breathe the gift of life given by God. This gift now seems to be polluted because the fresh air has been contaminated by the global warming gases.

Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini and Lombardy Episcopal Conference reject a materialists understanding of the notion of environment:

The human environment relationship… presents complex aspects…about which the Christian conscience is called to seek, above all, an initial clarification. Reduced to its most essential terms, Its question of man’s alteration of the biosphere, and therefore of the resources which are necessary for life…Nonetheless, beyond, beyond this small reality, environmental crisis can be and its spoken of not only in terms of material resource availability, but also in terms of its meaning and consequent spiritual values.[11]

Archbishop Renato Martino proposes the following definition at the Rio Conference:

The word environment itself means ‘that which surrounds.’ This very definition postulates the existence of a center around which the environment exists. That center is the human being, the only creature in this word who is not only capable of being conscious of itself and of its surroundings, but its gifted with the intelligence to explore, the sagacity to utilize, and its ultimately responsible for its choices and the consequences of those choices. The praiseworthy heightened awareness of the present generation of all components of the environment, and the consequence efforts at preserving and protecting them, rather than weakening the central position of the human being, accentuates its role and responsibilities.[12]

In the Encyclical Letter of Pope John Paul II Centesimus Annus, the Pope provides an even more complete formula regarding the definition of the environment, which goes against modern inclination to new forms of paganism:

In addition to irrational destruction of the natural environment, we must also mention the more serious destruction of the human environment, something which is by no means receiving the attention it deserves. Although people are rightly worried- though much less than they should be about preserving the natural habitats of the various animal species threatened with extinction, because that realize that each of these species makes its particular contribution to the balance of nature in general, too little effort is made to safeguard the moral conditions for authentic human ecology. Not only has God given the earth to man, who must use it with respect for the original good purpose for which it was given to him, but man too is God’s gift to man. He must therefore respect the natural and moral structure with which he has been endowed. In this context, mention should be made of the serious problems of the modern urbanization, of the need for urban planning which is concerned with how people are to alive, and of the attention which should be given to a ‘social ecology’ of work.[13]

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[1] Francis, Apostolic Exhortation on the Call to Holiness in Today’s World, Gaudete et Exsultete, Liberia Editrice Vaticana, Cittá del Vaticano 2018,106. 

[2]  LS, n. 202.

[3] R.S. Covey, The 8^th Habit, from Effectiveness to Greatness, Simon and Schuster London 2014, 19.

[4] R.S Covey, The 8^th Habit, from Effectiveness to Greatness, 21.

[5] Pope Benedict xvi General Audience, June 5, 2013; Jürgen Moltmann, et.al, La Terra Come Casa Comune, Crisi Ecologica ed Etica Ambientale, Edizione Dehoniane, Bologna 2017, 23.

[6] P. Haffner, Towards a Theology of the Environment, Gracewing, Herefordshire 2008, 77.

[7] Cf. P. Haffner, Towards a Theology of the Environment, 83.

[8] P. Haffner, Towards a Theology of the Environment, 87; L. Boff, Gaël Giraud – G. Costa, Curare MadreTerra, Commento all’enciclica Laudato Si’ di Papa Francesco, Edizine Dehoniane, Bologna 2017, 23.

[9] Cf. P. Haffner, Towards Theology of the Environment, 88.

[10] Cf. P. Haffner, Towards a theology of the Environment, 88.

[11] P. Haffner, Towards a Theology of Environment, 89.

[12] P. Haffner, Towards a Theology of Environment, 90.

[13] John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus (1 May 1991) in AAS 38(1991) 840-841.

Understanding the Key Terms in the Thesis

1.1 Understanding the key terms

1.1.1 The Earth

1.1.2 The Laudato Si’ “Common Home” Contextualized

The concept boma[1] has come to be defined as an art that brings people together to seek sustainability and human integral development. It is about the lifestyle as originally lived, not yet exploited, or processed by European invasion and colonization. This life was simple, humble and nothing was personally owned but communitarian. This is where the ubuntu philosophy picks up its launching pad. “I am because you are and you are because I am”. One defines himself through the other; where the other becomes a sort of mirror. We can define boma as an African school of community life, because everything that pertains to school structure is culturally and traditionally treasured and passed on to generation unto generation only that it’s orally transmitted and not written. Below is mental imagery picture that capture what boma outlook.

Boma is an investment entrusted to us by nature’s blessings. As the Kenyan proverbs states, ‘treat the earth well; it was not given to you by your parents; it was loaned to you by your children’.This is the theme that Pope Francis advances in his encyclical letter:

In the meantime, we come together to take charge of this home which has been entrusted to us, knowing that all the good which exists here will be taken up into the heavenly feast. In union with the creatures, we journey through this land seeking God, for if the world has a beginning and if it has been created, we must enquire who gave it this beginning, and who was its creator.[2]

 Unfortunately this boma is not treated well; it’s in a very dilapidating state. The earth as our boma is in a lamentation state. Pope Francis is calling us to mind to wake up to the occasion and save the Mother earth. The boma has become a real heap of rubbish what in swahili we call takataka.[3] The environment is polluted and something has to be done as far as keeping the common home clean and tidy. Man is has got lost into the technological web and has forgotten to take a break off from his computer, laptop, and cell phone.

 

This situation according to Pope Francis should take another course and meaning. The rate in which the earth is being degraded is so alarming the magnitude of exploitation, and violence inflicted on the earth is worrying and calls for urgent redress. Therefore, the Pope proposes that we ought to have establishment with a legal framework that sets clear boundaries in ensuring total protection of the ecosystem which has become indispensable, because the new world power of technology has swung in play with its techno-economic paradigm that seems to be overwhelming not only politicians but the who understanding of freedom and justice.[4]

The challenge we all facing is that renewing and making things a new, restarting and refreshingly sinking into a new experience with Jesus Christ the redeemer whom we must emulate in saving our very own common planet earth, before it’s too late to do so. Man has to start an introspective journey to find his compass bearing of returning back home. Like the prodigal son, we have all fallen short of in our acts of mission.

Man has to get himself back into self-examination and metanoia. He has to give correct response while seeking new tools for transforming the structures of injustice by actively getting his hand dirty in the process of removing filth from the common home.

Pope Francis is calling upon us to build a strong a strong sense of common brotherhood of co-exists with other living things in the universe. All these acts are geared towards personal and communitarian conversion as far as relation and care of creation is concerned.

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[1] Boma is a Swahili word for a homestead. Grass thatched huts made of mud, with a single door entrance, built surrounding the kraal, forming a semi-cycle with one main entrance that has no gate. Inside the bigger cycle of huts is another cycle that compromises of another homestead of animals, protected by planted natural herbs and thorn shrubs to secure the animals from escaping, hence picking up from AMECEA vision of Church as a family of God.

[2] LS, n. 244.

[3] Swahili word for dirt that is formation of soil and earth, garbage, rubbish, trash, refuse.

[4] LS, n. 53.

The Mission and Missionaries

One is always called to serve, to go out to share life experience this experience has to be well centered in Jesus or else one becomes a red cross volunteer or an NGO employee. Education and formation are central to this call. No one, who knows the history of mission, can doubt that missionaries were pioneers of education wherever they went, and it is hardly possible to exaggerate the debt of gratitude which is due to them for their labors in education, nor can it be doubted how important a part education, nor can it be doubted how important a part education has played in the process of evangelization.

The time is ripe enough to evaluate, to make it necessary to review the principles and their processes to whether today, we still would continue with them or abandon them all together or rebrand. This falls in the line of education and formation. If we have to prepare future missionaries for the church, much has to be put into consideration. All this has to be properly contextualized: India, China, Japan, Africa and what we can call "Muhammedan lands in the Near East".

The Christian Truth to indigenous thought and feeling, which has to form the heart of missioning. This will take a proper form of the identity of whoever is being involved in the mission, not missions. The mission is one, that of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who is in the communion of the Trinity who send the Church. Missions are the other activities we do in the mission like teaching, preaching, sacraments, etc. 

To have a mission means you are called by the Church, living what the Church teaches, and sent out with the help of the Holy Spirit to do that what the mother Church believes and loves. The rule is one: Belief what you read, teach what you believe and practice what you teach, live what you teach. All this will depend on: world conditions affecting Christian mission, theories learned in the formation and education. The rapidly changing world situation is seen as challenging the churches to produce a higher standard of mission agents who are ISO Certified and on top of their game, men and women who are genuinely called with the highest possible level of professional and theological training. 

WHY EMPHASIS ON ISO CERTIFIED FOR MISSION?

 

The missionary education should be a leavening, like yeast, the entire life of each nation with Christian beliefs and values. In tension with such a view where the church-centered approach that put the priority on the formation of leadership for the emerging indigenous churches. This is towards building a native Church. The primary purpose is to be served by the educational work of missionaries to train local, native Church to bear its own proper witness. The native church should be able to bear its own proper witness and to move forward towards the position of independence and self-government in which it ought to stand with native teachers, leaders, officers, training those who are to be spiritual leaders and teachers of their own nation, community, and congregation.

The central purpose of mission education is to influence the general life and thought of the community, and thereby to lay a greatly needed foundation for all forms of Christian work. The education and formation of local leaders for the emerging indigenous churches take priority, in the estimation of Christian values and principles throughout wider society.

The attitude of thinking that Christianity is a foreign influence, tending to alienate its converts from the mission life. We have to awaken ourselves, our consciousness among people of all regions in our considerations of what it means to be Christian educators. Missionaries should be experts in indigenization, inculturation and contextualization approaches, what we have to factor in the emerging ecumenical paradigms. Theologians and educators of the century have not only to keep writing but to put themselves on the road to enter classes and present themselves, or what we can call identify themselves.

Mission was not about disseminating in new cultural contexts the form of Christian faith which had found expression in the western world. It was rather a matter of the common core of the faith being received and processed in terms of many different cultures and contexts worldwide. In every context, missionaries should not be people to transport to the countries in which they mission that form or type of Christianity which is prevalent in the lands from which they have come but to lodge in the hearts of the people the fundamental truths of Christianity.

Catholicity should not be seen in matters of uniformity in every aspect of life and conduct. The universality of Christian faith is to be found, rather in a shared adherence to the substance of the substance of the faith, as expressed in a statement such as the Apostles' Creed, which allows the faith to be appropriately expressed in a great variety of the ways according to the distinctive genius of each people and nation. The work of acclimatization should and ought to be done by native teachers; the native pastors that become the most important work of Christian missions. This will depend on how they will be trained, no to denationalize them or occupy their minds with distinctively western elements and controversies of religion.

Christianity, even if it's highly valued, appears to be a faith that is foreign to the local culture and context. This drives us to the whole question of language, where an international language such as English is a medium of instruction. Religion can only be acclimatized in the heart of the natives of the country if it finds expression in their native language, the language of the ordinary home. A theology which is truly indigenous as well as properly Christian and Biblical must develop a native terminology, an end which is only likely to be attained where vernacular is used for the expression of religious ideas.

The greatest pain must be taken as far as possible to use all that is available in the literature of the nation to provide preparation for distinctively Christian learning and literature, and it must never be left out of sight that an indigenous Christian means a native Christian literature by competent native writers. The primary task of evangelists is to raise up properly equipped and instructed native Churches and native leaders who shall have to temptation to feel that they are alienated from life and aspiration of their nation in becoming Christians. If the Gospel has to be inculturated, indigenized, adopted into a specific people, have to be presented in the people's language, not a medium of foreign language it will have no sense and will lose its meaning, but to do something else of missions rather than mission.

The people of God have to be educated, the education which has to equip them for positions of usefulness and influence in the community, and secures the development of strong Christian manhood and womanhood. The education of women should take priority. There can be no question at all that the education of women is, in every grade, quite as important as the education of men, and that educational training is quite as important in the case of women teachers as in the case of men. Character is largely determined in the early years and by the influence of the mother in the home, the education of women acquires a place of first importance. While higher education may be less necessary in the case of women than men, but on condition that care should be taken not to offend unnecessarily traditional feeling respecting the place of women in society, yet in all plans for Christian education, women ought to receive equal consideration with men, and equal care should be exercised that the education provided for them is adapted to their needs. This will lead to a social revolution. (Cf. M.P. Joseph, Missionary Education: 105-18).

HOW MISSIONARIES OUGHT TO BE PREPARED

The whole issue at hand is based on the human side of it that hinges on the quality of the missionary. The quality of the missionary will triumph over the absence of money. The quality of the missionary, therefore, becomes a supreme question of investigation. This will manifest in the Christian life, where we encounter Christ who was more than a Teacher and his messengers must do their best to manifest the power hidden in the Christian Life. This comes out both in personality and life of the evangelist and in every variety of medical, education and industrial work.

The real grasp of the message has to be delivered, and a personal experience of its power, understanding of the needs and perplexities of human life in general, and in particular of the modes of thought of those to whom the message is to be delivered, the ability to show how the message meets these needs. Men of exceptional ability and learning often fail curiously in a field where everything is new to them. The very fullness of a man’s attainment may make docility and humility more difficult, and yet it is upon these childlike qualities more than on outstanding ability that true success in leadership depends.

The missionaries training, for all types of missionaries, should integrate spiritual, moral and intellectual elements. Formal training has its limitations. No act of the self can win them, and it follows that no training can give them, though it may remove some obstacles in the way of their development. Missionaries have to learn to face great strain and heavy responsibility without the support of visible Christian fellowship and to maintain a high level of spiritual life without the continual renewing which is supplied under normal conditions by the ordinances of common worship.

On the other side we have the moral training with its qualities of docility in being open and willing to learn; gentleness that comes with the spirit of courtesy, this should enable missionaries to understand the customs of the people among whom they are called to live; and sympathy that empowers missionaries to love the people they serve. A missionary is powerless to help people whom he cannot love. There should be a mutual understanding between the missionaries and the people they encounter.

The other is the intellectual training that has to be the best education which his own country and Church can give him or her, whatever is to be his department of labor. If he is to be a preacher, theological teacher, or an educationalist, he must go through the task of technical equipment for those offices. A medical man, he must have the full training and professional qualifications which are necessary to his standing as a physician in his own country.

The intellectual formation should help a missionary to be an open-minded person, can't be profoundly trained in one direction, especially for a great profession involving varied cultures, and is most capable of self-adaptation to changing circumstances and to new calls upon its energy. The urgent need now is for quality leadership and we have to do what it takes to improve and rework on what kind of missionary we want to pass on to the coming generation.